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Demand Media Prices IPO, Begins Trading Today

Santa Monica-based Demand Media said late Tuesday evening that it has priced its IPO, as well as increased its IPO offering size, and will sell 8,900,000 shares of its common stock at $17.00 per share. Demand Media, which operates an online publishing business and sites such as LiveStrong and eHow, upped the pricing well above its initial offering range of $14.00 to $16.00 per share, and above the initial 7,500,000 shares. The firm will begin trading today on the New York Stock Exchange as "DMD".

The IPO was underwritten by Goldman, Sachs & Co., Morgan Stnaley & Co., UBS Securities LLC, Allen & Company LLC, Jefferies & Company, Inc., Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated, RBC Capital Markets Corporation, Pacific Crest Securities LLC, Raine Securities and JMP Securities LLC. The firm's investors include Oak Investment Partners, Spectrum Equity, W Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs & Co., and Generation Partners.

Demand Media had initially filed for its IPO in August. The IPO is just the latest in a long string of successful IPOs for Southern California, venture backed companies, with successful public exits so far for RealD, Inphi Corp., Zogenix, Green Dot, MaxLinear and ReachLocal. A number of other companies have filed but have not yet reached the markets, including GameFly, Cornerstone OnDemand, Boingo Wireless, and Peregrine Semiconductor, among others.